Game of Thrones. The Walking Dead. Girls. Downton Abbey. The Celebrity Apprentice. The Good Wife. The Simpsons.

Once upon a time, well, at least before there was a show called Once Upon a Time, Sunday nights were a wasteland for TV. Sunday night football and 60 Minutes ruled.

But television abhors a vacuum, and now your PVR is full. And it’s going to get more overloaded this Sunday with the highly anticipated season six premiere of Mad MenAMC’s Mad Men.

Will Don Draper cheat on his wife? More importantly, will he wear briefs under those tight suits as he has reportedly been instructed to do to keep from distracting viewers?

“Sunday nights is crazy for me,” says Lisa Ho Lung, a Don Draper fan. “Now I’ve got to figure out how to watch Mad Men and The Good Wife and Law and Order at the same time.”

Luckily, the Toronto fund manager has a degree in mathematics. With all the wherewithal of an economist trying to figure out the fiscal cliff, she has had to spreadsheet which shows she wants to tape and which ones to watch live on Sundays.

“I don’t know how things got this nuts — I’m also trying to have a life.”

Ho Lung says Mondays are the worst days — because people invariably talk about their favourite shows when they get in the office.

“It’s a spoiler nightmare. The last thing I want is someone to tell me who got killed on Game of Thrones when I’m having morning coffee.”

How did Sunday nights get this competitive for television — and whose brilliant idea was it to have the Game of Thrones season premiere go up against the season finale of The Walking Dead last Sunday?

(The Walking Dead won that battle, by the way.)

For starters, you can blame it on the cable guys.

“Sunday nights was a night that wasn’t totally dominated by conventional television, and it had a lot of potential for large audiences,” says Daniel Eves, vice-president of programming and specialty for Shaw Media.

“We have certainly seen a trend where cable channels are taking advantage of Sunday night and the quality of content has grown.”

“You’ve got a situation where you now have regular Sunday-night programming on conventional television as well as great stuff on cable,” says Eves.

Sundays is becoming increasingly crowded, and we haven’t even mentioned reality hits such as The Celebrity Apprentice or sideline shows such as Courtney & Kim Take Miami, which remains a winner for E!

“We haven’t quite hit the saturation point, but we are always having the conversation of how much more available is the audience and how different the audience might be on Sunday,” says Eve.

Still, while it is gaining ground, Sunday is still not considered the marquee night for conventional or mainstream broadcasters, also known as the guys you can get over the air for free. For CTV, City, Global or CBC, weeknights from Monday to Thursday can still rule in audience share.

CTV, for example, recently promoted its hot new procedural Motive to Thursday nights from its Sunday-night slot. It now follows Grey’s Anatomy — the great white shark of TV medical drama.

Thursdays in particular have traditionally been the battleground for broadcasters. During the 1980s and 1990s NBC’s “Must See TV” Thursdays included a lineup of heavyweights such as The Cosby Show, Seinfeld, Friends, ER, Hill Street Blues and L.A. Law.

That night has gotten a lot more competitive since The Littlest Hobo aired on Thursday nights in 1979, owning the 7:30 p.m. time slot for six seasons.

“We were so entrenched that when the Pope got shot and we were pre-empted, the CTV switchboard was flooded with viewers complaining,” said Christopher Dew, the supervising producer on the show.

Friday and Saturday nights have long been the kiss of death for television shows, since a sizeable demographic are out for the weekend, and presumably not sitting at home watching the boob tube.

(The “Friday Night Death Slot” phenomenon is thought to have crystallized with NBC putting the original Star Trek on at 8:30 p.m., which creator Gene Roddenberry said hastened the death of his show.)

Sundays, meanwhile, was the bleak real estate that no one wanted after Friday and Saturday.

But given that cable has used Sunday to launch marquee series, it has forced conventional broadcasters to up their own game.

Sunday nights have become increasingly important and a place to launch big event shows such as the Oscars. A CTV spokesperson said that Sunday nights on the network have been “steady,” scoring three Top 30 shows in each of the past three years. Programmers have unleashed Once Upon a Time and The Amazing Race to stem the cable tide.

“Sunday nights have been viewed as a night for prestige shows for both conventional and specialty, but especially for CTV,” said the spokesperson.

Meanwhile, Ho Lung says she’s had to use her old-school VHS tape recorder to handle the overflow of shows on Sunday.

“But that’s just about all I can handle. I’m not sure what I’m going to do when Dexter comes back in the summer.”

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